Last week, a 105-year-old man thought to be Spain’s last living survivor of the 1918 pandemic warned the world to “be careful” amid the coronavirus outbreak. “I don’t want to see the same thing repeated. It claimed so many lives,” José Ameal Peña told Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

While the 1918 flu and COVID-19 are different diseases, and much has changed in the world of medicine since then, newspaper advertisements from 1918 show that, in some ways, the two moments are strikingly similar.

“We say that history is in cycles and that history repeats itself, and for this it’s exactly the same in several aspects,” says Elisabeth Zetland, a researcher at MyHeritage, which has a database of 11.9 billion searchable historical records, including newspapers, largely specializing in family history. (The newspapers are searchable here.) In early March, as the coronavirus started spreading rapidly, Zetland searched for “Spanish flu” in MyHeritage’s historical newspaper collection. “What struck me were the similarities,” she says, “and I was not expecting them to be so strong compared to now.”